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Comment by afavour | Hacker News Reader

It's weird that we expect Github to do that, in a way. The repo might well be hosted on there for free, but we all want Github to spend a ton in legal fees to defend something they make zero cash from.

I'm not sure what my point is here other than finding it sad that code hosting is so centralised.

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Github's market position is in no small part based on network effects and depends on nearly every open source project being hosted there.

Now imagine a competitor promising some kind of protection against these kinds of frivolous DMCAs. That could lead to a large chunk of media, p2p and security software moving there, threatening Github's position in those niches and putting that competitor on more equal footing.

I think it's in Github's interests to push back on this. MPA's dubious legal requests likely cost Github time, money, and PR to resolve properly. It adds up over time and I doubt any company wants to be caught in the middle of an arms-race conflict like this, nipping it in the bud could very well be worth the upfront legal fees.

I imagine MPA would also be emboldened by this if Github removes the Nyaa repository forever on what is basically a pretty flimsy basis ("Nyaa.si uses the code and that's a piracy website so the code itself is piracy").

What's next? Transmission and rtorrent?

A better way would be to start excluding MPA and their behaviour in our open source licenses.

>A better way would be to start excluding MPA and their behaviour in our open source licenses.

This is a remarkably good idea. Add an explicit clause to major open source project licenses that disallow use by the MPAA and similar groups, along with enough explicit damages spelled out to give it teeth.

Then those licenses would no longer be open source licenses.

We do. We want to see github or anyone defend any fake lawsuit against them.

Good thing there aren't any lawsuits against anyone then.

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